Sweet I will give that a try after I Defrag and see if there is any marked improvement.

I would really be interested in seeing someones screen shots that is running Raid0 and one of Raid5 to see the changes. Both with a 7200Rpm system and another with Raptors.

Anyone have these configs that would like to post using HDTach on the longer test.

Be interesting seeing different rigs and setups compared in the same thread.

<<>> UPDATE

Well my drives were not that fragged anyway but performing a defrag made no real difference in performance. Maybe if the drive was heavily fragged it would have.

I also deduced that the dips in my chart were times I was doing other things while performing the test. Duhhh,

One thing very noticeable though is how the Raptor is much much louder than the Caviar. The rapter can be clearly heard doing its defrag whilst the Caviar is virtually silent.

One other thing is I have a marked improvement when testing using HD_Speed (85.5) over HD_Tach (72.5)

Also I figured out that I should not have been touching the mouse and performing other things during the test. Hence my dips in the graph.

Yeah, during any test... you always want to just leave everything alone. As far as the dip, many drives have them.. and mine is the "smoothest" line i can remember having. Some disks(especially in RAID0) give a result like EKG's I always do at least 2 defrags in a row... the first rearranges the big/badly fragmented files, and the second and sometimes third clean up the loose ends.

Edit: Your results look "normal" for their respective drives. As far as screenshots.. i hit the "print screen" button, open MSPaint...paste, and save as JPEG. I host through photobucket which isn't bad at compressing images. I've been using Irfanview for ~7 years... and it's a great app.. one of the first 10 i install on a fresh install...but i just use Paint for SS's. GL